


Possible

by aishahiwatari



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Language of Flowers, M/M, Pre-Slash, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23495911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aishahiwatari/pseuds/aishahiwatari
Summary: Jim remembers very little of his first day at Starfleet Academy. He started drinking at seven and never really stopped, managed to register and find his room and realise he couldn’t spend another moment cooped up in there.Somewhere in the mess is a conversation he didn’t understand at the time. Something about- having to leave.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Philip Boyce/Christopher Pike
Comments: 26
Kudos: 176





	Possible

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BunnyGeneral](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BunnyGeneral/gifts).



> This was a gift created as part of the Valentines' exchange on the McKirk Discord for the wonderful BunnyGeneral, who is always kind and encouraging and takes care of us all.
> 
> This could be read as pre-slash or intense platonic.

Jim remembers very little of his first day at Starfleet Academy. He started drinking at seven and never really stopped, managed to register and find his room and realise he couldn’t spend another moment cooped up in there.

Someone asked him if he wanted to get a drink. Jim did.

There are vague impressions after that. Bars, and then clubs. Laughing, dancing, the warmth of human contact. Some people are funny about that, always wear gloves and long sleeves, but Jim touched countless people that night.

Somewhere in the mess is a conversation he didn’t understand at the time. Something about- having to leave. A daughter. An accident. Jim’s not the best with those conversations when he’s sober, let alone-

So, no. He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t really think about it.

That is to say, he shuts it down quickly when he does think about it, which is most mornings, because his dreams seem to know, even if he doesn’t, can never consciously recall, who gave him the branches of pink blossoms etched up his spine, curving along his ribs.

It’s just hidden enough from his view for him to forget it’s there, to be reminded anew every single time that somebody out there sparked a meaningful connection with him, one that he’s apparently fated to have.

And he has no idea who they are.

Presumably they also have his flower emblazoned on their skin. Mental connection sparks it, but physical connection seals it and Jim’s seen sparked marks. This is too big, too expansive, too significant to be that.

Nobody asks, although he can tell when they want to. He’s long since given up believing it might be anybody at the Academy. Somebody would have recognised it by now.

So it’s a stranger, somebody he confided in a little too deeply while he was drunk, probably someone he danced with. Maybe they were just passing through.

It’s for the best. Jim isn’t exactly prime partner material, anyway. Between his course load, his additional command track activities; his extracurriculars; his hand-to-hand tutoring with the fourteen year old kid nobody else seems willing to make an effort with, Jim’s probably better off without the burden of romantic entanglement.

In fact, Jim can hardly keep up any meaningful relationships at all. Apart from Pavel -and then by extension Scotty, the mad scientist with whom he’s collaborating on some new transporter technology- and Nyota, who is much more tolerant of Jim and his antics when he’s taking xenolinguistics seriously, and who introduces him to Spock, who might be a tutor but he’s more than happy to argue with Jim for hours about the ethical considerations behind the Academy testing methods. Plus, there’s Hikaru, who holds the high score on every one of the flight simulators and is willing to share how, and of course Gaila, as well as Pike, who’s invited him over for dinner and drinks more than once, and introduced him to Phil, who’s clearly very important to him.

Jim hasn’t had friends in a long time. Maybe not ever. Sometimes they’re so good to him he can hardly stand it.

It’s not like there’s anything missing from his life. He has somewhere to live, food to eat, plenty of opportunities to learn and grow, among good people. More than he’s ever had before.

He had thought at first that those things would make it stop. For a while, it had seemed like they had, but the novelty of his new situation wore off gradually after that first day and the emptiness is still there, the vast chasm inside of him, the burning, toxic sensation he imagines the flowers leave on his skin. He still feels like he’s waiting for something he can’t even name.

It’s worst when he’s alone, so he makes every effort not to be. Nyota examines him shrewdly, occasionally, but Spock seems to accept it as some strange human quirk of is and never comments or turns him away. Hikaru has a family -a functional one, the intricacies of which escape Jim entirely- but he’s always up for spending time during the week. And talking Scotty out of his more ridiculous ideas becomes a routine occupation for both Jim and Pavel –“Leave the beagle out of this! Just- use some fruit, or something!”- and for every watermelon seed he has to pick out of his hair, he feels grateful they’re not tufts of fur.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Scotty assures him, once he’s put out the fire.

“No shit!” Pavel throws a chunk of fruit at him, and it all descends from there.

-

Pike is the only one of them with a mark he’s willing to display, or unable to hide. Orange lilies protrude from beneath his collar, and Jim’s never been able to tell if they’re Phil’s or not. It seems unlikely.

“Does it fill the hole?” Jim asks once, when he’s too drunk not to, when he’s close enough to touch but he doesn’t. “As it gets bigger? When you find them?”

“Nobody can do that but you,” he thinks Pike says, or something like it.

“I think I know who it was, but- it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s okay if it does.”

“He’s never coming back.”

“Not even for you?”

“Especially not-“ Jim cuts himself off, closes his eyes, and then suddenly he’s too tired to go on. He leans his head on a strong shoulder.

“Then he’s even more of a fool than you are,” he dreams of Pike saying.

Jim wakes up the next morning in his own bed with no recollection of how he got there, and with a message on his comm informing him he’s been enrolled in a mandated course of counselling.

“Traitor,” he says to Pike the next time he sees him, without malice.

Pike just smiles, and hands him a padd confirming his post on the Enterprise on completion of his training.

“What, were you waiting for me to get drunk and ask you personal questions?”

“I was waiting for you to admit you can’t do this alone. A Captain stands above. Not apart.”

There’s nobody around. Jim hugs him, and allows himself to be held.

-

Jim is in the shower the first time he sees it, the splatter of red and pink, pinwheel-like flowers around his ankle. Sweet William, an online archive tells him. Symbolic of chivalry and courage.

-

“Please tell me they’re yours,” he says to Chris. He’s not ready for another mystery connection. He’s on Chris’ couch, fully dressed aside from his boots and socks. It’s startlingly intimate, the way Chris cradles his ankle and caresses the petals with his thumb. Jim could swear they bloom a little brighter as he does.

“They are,” Chris says, even though Jim knows he wouldn’t have touched anyone else’s mark.

“I don’t-“ fuck, no, Jim’s too sober to cry, but he chokes a little when he confesses, “I don’t know what mine is.” He doesn’t even know if Chris will have his mark. He has so many better options. Maybe Jim’s just got the wrong idea about the whole thing.

Except- “Would you like to see?” Chris says, and somehow Jim nods. It’s the first time he’s ever meant enough to someone to leave any mark of his significance, so- yes, he wants to see.

He’s not quite prepared for what Chris reveals. It’s not uncommon for people to have maybe three or four marks. Nobody’s ever been able to pin down the splash of something otherworldly that commemorates the intense, intimate connections made, although biological relatives generally don’t trigger the effect.

Chris is covered, almost from the neck down. His chest is an away of colour and he removes his pants and his legs are covered too, almost all the way down.

He notices Jim staring and he smiles. He has to know he looks, especially to someone like Jim. “Phil says I’m a medical marvel.”

“Phil says you’re going to end up court martialled if you keep stripping off in front of cadets,” Phil actually says, from where he’s sat on the neighbouring armchair, scrolling on his padd.

Jim’s still staring. “How many?”

“Six- seventeen, now,” it’s Phil who answers, while Chris just submits to examination, only a little bemused when Jim cranes his neck to see what even he knows are daffodils cascading over his shoulder. “Yours is on his stomach. The red amaryllis. Six petals, looks a little like a lily.”

Jim’s flower knowledge is limited, through a combination of lacking opportunity and intentional disregard, but his heart seizes the moment he realises which one Phil means. Bright, vivid, intense, abnormally bright even to his inexperienced eyes.

He reaches out to touch, and nobody stops him.

He’s heard it described like an electric shock, but it just feels warm, spreading through him from that point of contact.

It doesn’t fill the void, but the edges of it feel a lot less jagged.

“You could have kept your pants on,” Phil tells Chris.

-

It’s a sentiment he expresses often, albeit only occasionally in those particular words. Chris is forever taking things too far, and it’s been Phil’s job to contain the fallout for as long as he cares to remember.

As explosives go, Jim Kirk doesn’t seem like such a bad one. Phil wasn’t sure at first, suspected Chris of picking up a stray more out of sympathy than any genuine belief in his ability.

Phil should have known better.

He should have known better, too, than to expect a slow day at Academy Medical when there’s a group of kids signing up for summer camp.

At least one of the parents is a doctor, so the patient suffering from a sudden onset of the Cardassian flu is brought directly to him, rather than being made to wait.

When they’re done, and this poor parent has borne the brunt of the violent struggle and acidic vomit -he knew enough to identify the disease, but has clearly never treated it, or he would have stepped back- Phil offers to lend him a shirt while he waits for his to be cleaned. “Can I convince you to stay? We could use more cadets like you.”

The parent -who, not that Phil notices, is tall, dark, gorgeous and intensely awkward when he’s not even more intensely focused- snorts. He begins to unbutton his shirt. “Ha. No. Just dropping off my daughter. I’m just a country- doctor, although even I still know that’s inappropriate.”

It really is. Phil catches himself far too late; he’s already got a hand on the man’s chest, fingers framing the petals of the flowers there.

Now, Phil makes it his business to know soulmarks. He has more obscure flower knowledge than most of the apparent experts, and Chris is forever coming home with some new obscure bloom on his skin that needs analysing.

So Phil knows this one. He knows this red amaryllis, every shade and frayed petal, can trace the veins of fate that link this man to him.

He’s heard the story, in fragments, occasionally even from Jim himself when he’s drunk enough for same-state recall to kick in. He met a man on the shuttle, went drinking with him. Got to know him. Connected. And then the man left, because of his daughter and some kind of accident. The next morning, Jim woke up with a mark that tortured him with the potential of what might have been, for years.

Phil wonders how much this man remembers. “You were here. Three years ago.”

“Yeah. For about a day.”

Phil’s being eyed with suspicion, trepidation, but not yet animosity. Maybe he thinks it’s just his medical skills that were memorable.

Phil hands him a spare shirt. It’s one of Chris’. “You roomed with Jim Kirk.”

“The fucked-up kid with the-“ the man gestures to his face. At least he remembers. What’s he thought of the mystery mark on his chest all these years? Has he not wondered about the young man with whom he so readily bonded? “Yeah. How’s he getting on? He make officer?”

“He’s being made Captain of the Enterprise.”

It’s premature, but not untrue. Chris hasn’t been the same since Nero, even after everything else he’s been though. Spock’s competent, but he’s not Captain material. Number One laughed for a full two minutes when she was asked whether she’d give up her posting on the Yorktown to take command.

“I’m- having trouble imagining that. How do you know so much-“ Realisation hits, then. The man -McCoy, wasn’t it?- touches his own chest, that vivid, vibrant flower too expansive, too bright for him simply not to care. “Him?” he asks, and he’s stunned but there’s hope there, too. Like he saw all the potential in Jim that Chris has been able to realise.

Phil should have known he wouldn’t have it in himself to be angry, by the time they really met. “Do you want me to call him?”

-

Leonard does not.

It’s not like he planned a dramatic reunion scene, or anything. But he’s a closet romantic -even though he’s not quite sure if this magnetism, this urge for closeness is romantic, just yet- and he wants it to be good. Memorable for the right reasons.

Since their first meeting wasn’t.

Frankly, he’s astounded Jim has any recollection of him at all. They were both so drunk, so utterly lost in that sea of red uniforms and order, seeking something neither of them could really identify.

Jim looks right at home in his gold shirt, now. Something’s refined his shaky overcompensation into genuine, deserved confidence, and Leonard’s heart aches when he realises that something could have been him. Instead he faded into insignificance, held onto only by the whims of an otherworldly force that inserts colours beneath their skin.

Leonard doesn’t deserve Jim. Maybe he never did. But he wants to try.

When he takes those final few steps across the Officers’ Mess to the table at which Jim is sitting, Leonard feels his confidence falter.

He feels it shatter entirely when Jim’s eyes find his.

“Bones?”

It’s said with incredulity, a startled kind of surprise that shrills Jim’s voice, just a little.

And hope.

Too late, Leonard realises how this looks. An old acquaintance suddenly appearing from the woodwork now Jim’s successful, when Leonard couldn’t even call before. He’s going to have to take his time, ease in gently, work to convince him Leonard’s not just skipped out on his formative years and come to reap the benefits.

Except every single one of his words dries up in his mouth. He can’t say, “It’s so good to see you,” or “I’ve missed you,” or even, “Hey, kid.”

God, when had he ever thought Jim was the less mature of the two of them?

Maybe Starfleet would have done Leonard some good, after all. At least taught him some diplomacy. Helped him keep his cool in tense situations. Given him any single idea of what to say or how to show Jim that- they have something.

In the end, Leonard just unbuttons his shirt.

“Careful, Bones, that security officer’s going to- oh.”

“I’m sorry I left,” seems as good a place to start as any, while Jim’s staring at the blooming expanse of red flowers adorning Leonard’s chest. It’s a big mark, for how little time they’ve spent together. It’s always been growing. It gives Leonard hope that Jim still thinks of him. That there’s a chance.

“You had your daughter, Bones. That’s important.”

Leonard hadn’t realised how much he’d missed that nickname, or how much he’d hate to hear the casual deflection in Jim’s voice as he downplays his own importance.

“I should at least have called.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Well, shit. Jim still goes right for the jugular.

Leonard has all kinds of excuses ready. Jo needs stability and reliable role models; Jim plans to go up into space, where Leonard can’t possibly follow; even sitting in that bar, Leonard had identified a list of untreated maladies and injuries as long as his arm.

Jim deserves the truth. “I was terrified.”

“And you’re not now?”

“No, I still am.”

Jim laughs, a little. But his eyes are downcast, not just taking in the details of the amaryllis on Leonard’s skin. He has doubts.

Leonard’s willing to do what it takes to convince him. “I was terrified it wasn’t you.”

“Still might not be,” Jim’s sniping, now. Testing him. Giving him the opportunity to walk away. Maybe he knows Leonard had no intention of coming in here, even knowing they’d be able to cross paths. Fuck, he’s such a coward.

“Then I guess fuck it. I’ve thought about you a lot. My life’s a mess, and you got tangled up in the Starfleet part of it that I left behind. You- I saw the news. You could have died up there. I probably wouldn’t even have known. I would never have had this chance again, so- whether you have my mark or not, I want you. In my life. However that- however you want.”

“I’m going up there again. They’re doing five-year missions now.”

Jim’s still protecting them both. This will hurt, this thing between them, so much and so often, as soon as they acknowledge it, and it will only get worse the longer they’re apart.

“I know.”

It’s not enough, but it’s a start. Jim contemplates, then he glances around, stands, turns, pulls his shirt up at the back just enough for Leonard to see the pink blossoms etched along his spine, branching out along the lines of his ribs.

Leonard feels warmth flood through him. He itches to touch. The colours seem to shine a little brighter under the intensity of his gaze. Something inside him slots into place, and he finds a little more confidence.

Then Jim says, “Didn’t think you were a cherry blossom kind of guy.”

“It’s not a cherry blossom, you corn-fed hick. Didn’t you grow up on a farm?”

Jim laughs. He’s captivating. Radiant, Phil had said. That’s what Jim’s flower means. Beauty, and pride, and triumph after a long struggle.

“It’s a goddamn peach blossom.”

Peach blossoms symbolise longevity and health. Jim doesn’t know that yet, but Leonard hopes he’ll get the chance to show him.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m also on [Tumblr](https://aishahiwatari.tumblr.com/)


End file.
